The concept of Rogue originated with Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. Toy grew up in Livermore, California, where his father was a nuclear scientist. Once a year, the father's workplace allowed their employees family to visit, which including allowing them to use the facility's mainframe system to play games. Toy took interest in the text-based Star Trek game (1971), which represented space combat through characters on screen, and required players to make strategic decisions each turn. Toy took to learn programming and recreate this game on other computer systems that he could access, including the Processor Technology Sol-20 and the Atari 400.

Toy subsequently enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the late 1970s. Working first on UCSC's PDP-11 and then its VAX-11, Toy began exploring what games were available over ARPANET, the predecessor of the current Internet. One game that intrigued him was Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure) (1976) by William Crowther and Don Woods. Adventure, considered the first text-based adventure game, challenged the player to explore a cave system through descriptions given by the computer and commands issued by the player. Toy was impressed by the game and started writing his own.

Toy and Lane initially funded the publishing, distribution, and promotion of the IBM PC version themselves, and though they continued to gain sales, they were only were able to break even as they lacked the power of a larger distributor. Around 1984, Robert Borch, the vice president of publishing at Epyx discovered that Rogue had become popular by several of Epyx's employees and that they suggested that Epyx should help fund ports to other systems. Though Borch felt there was niche appeal to the game, he followed this advice and contracted A.I. Design to port the game to the Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga upon which Epyx would take over distribution and marketing.

Toy obtained an Macintosh and took the lead in marketing the game to that system. Both Toy and Lane recognized that they could implement improved graphics with the Macintosh version, but neither had art skills to make the icons. Toy reached out Wichman to help with these graphics. Wichman was initially cautious due to the fact that his credit for Rogue in the PC version had been cast as a "contribution" equal to the UCSC playtesters rather than as equal to Toy, Arnold, or Lane. However, he agreed to help and joined A.I. Design. Much of the Macintosh version was developed in concert by Toy, Wichman, and Lane in a cabin at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort. Following this, Epyx requested that Wichman lead the development of the Atari ST version, with the company providing Wichman a system to work on. This work occurred alongside Toy's work on the Amiga version. Wichman enlisted help from an Epyx in-house artist, Michael Kosaka, to create the art on the Atari ST version. Epyx would also fund A.I. Design to port the game to other systems including the TRS-80 Color.

Borch recognized the difficulty in marketing Rogue through traditional methods compared to other games on the market at that time, and opted to push the title through software catalogs rather than retail channels. Though it sold well initially, Rogue's sales quickly declined and was considered a commercial flop. Besides the competition from more graphically-interesting games, Wichman attributed the failure to the fact that the commercial version of Rogue was essentially the same game previously offered for free via BSD and did not pose a new challenge. Epyx eventually went bankrupt in 1989, and A.I. Design disbanded. None of Toy, Wichman, Arnold, or Lane profited greatly from Rogue though became renowned in the industry for their participation on the game.